


Counting the Cars

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: America - Simon & Garfunkel (Song)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 11:30:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I embarrassed myself with my youth, my small-town background, the way I'd never been west of Chicago or east of Cleveland, and the idea of being homeless back then felt kind of romantic and exciting, something I'd be able to tell stories about next semester. In those days you could thumb a ride just about anywhere on the continent, as long as you didn't mind it taking a while, and nobody I knew ever got killed doing it. I had hardly any money and this sudden determined wanderlust; combining the two seemed like the best idea in the world."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting the Cars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



I was homeless for the summer between my first and second years of college, when my folks took a trip to Europe and rented the house out while they were gone. I told them I had a place to stay with some guys from school, but really I just wanted a whole summer to myself for the first time in my life. There was so much of the world I knew nothing about. I guess it takes college to make you see that. I embarrassed myself with my youth, my small-town background, the way I'd never been west of Chicago or east of Cleveland, and the idea of being homeless back then felt kind of romantic and exciting, something I'd be able to tell stories about next semester. In those days you could thumb a ride just about anywhere on the continent, as long as you didn't mind it taking a while, and nobody I knew ever got killed doing it. I had hardly any money and this sudden determined wanderlust; combining the two seemed like the best idea in the world.

When you come up with plans like this you spin off vague daydreams about all the girls you'll meet, and the way they'll remember you forever as _that guy from that night in that town when I was nineteen_ like you were some huge milestone that the rest of their lives get measured from. Self-absorbed asshole that I was, I never for a second imagined it would be the other way around, that I would meet a girl that summer and never forget the sound of her laugh or the shape of her bitten fingernails that time she held my hand through part of Pennsylvania.

Ann Arbor was where I met her. She'd hitched over from Detroit, where she'd been staying in a crowded little apartment with bearded folk singers whose names she never learned, and me from just outside Saginaw after I went back home from college to wave my parents off on their trip, and we wound up in the same crowded diner going for the same empty booth. I put my hands up and mumbled sorry, but she flashed her crooked smile and offered to share, so we did.

"If you chew your food with your mouth open I'll change my mind," she said as the waitress poured our coffee. She had this accent I couldn't place – English, that was as far as I got, but all I really knew about English accents were the Beatles and the Queen and she was nothing like either of those, although she had a Beatles patch sewn on her backpack with clumsy childish stitches. _Mouth_ was _mouf_ and _with_ was _wiv_ , and some of the words tripped and stumbled and fell together like she thought time was running out and someone was going to make her shut up before she was finished talking. She told me her name – _Kathy, short for Kathryn with a K no E and a Y, not spelled like Deneuve or Hepburn_ – and mine seemed like nothing in comparison, just some stupid little sound – _Joe, not even short for Joseph, it's just Joe_.

"So, Just Joe," she said as we headed out to the street, "do you want a seatmate for the bus?"

"What if I'm a murderer?"

"We're all gonna die sooner or later anyway. Where are we going?" 

I stopped at the nearest store to buy a map and cigarettes and told her to choose, and she chose east, so we headed east. Decisions that summer happened as easily as closing our eyes and pointing. We had nowhere to be and nothing to see, just a pack of smokes and a decreasing pile of dollar bills between us. In a way I think that made us feel more free than if we'd been rich.

Heading east, riding the half-empty bus through the night towards the dawn, I guess I was trying to impress her because I invented trips to South America, a distant relationship to Theodore Roosevelt, a passion for surfing. All of them fell flat because I'm a shitty liar - but when she told me about her year in Morocco it was like I could see the colours, I could smell the sea when she told me about her backpacking summer in Norway, I heard every cracking twig of her camping trip to the Black Forest. I asked her why Michigan after all that, why come someplace where nothing ever happens - unless you like lakes, I guess, or freezing your ass off through impossible winters. She gave me a funny sideways look, tucking her loose hair back behind her ear all self-consciously as if for the first time since I met her she felt awkward or nervous about saying something. "The Land of the Free, I heard. I wanted to see how true that was."

"And?"

"It's more free than home, anyway."

At a rest stop near Harrisburg we drank black coffee – that's what that summer tasted like, cooling black coffee because it was cheaper than food – and she told me about England, her family, her school, her town. Her weird accent called it _Lestoh_ but she spelled it out for me, Leicester, and I told her about my dad, who spelled and pronounced his name _Lester_. She jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow for teasing her and stole the rest of my candy bar as compensation. Of course I let her take it, I probably would have given her a kidney by that point if she asked for one. It's an obsessive, strange sort of attraction I'll never be able to explain. Would I have looked twice at her if I saw her in class or in the park or in a bar back home, with her plain face and pretty smile and halter tops in every colour of the rainbow? I don't know, but I know that summer would have been lonely as hell without her.

She was reading Emily Dickinson on the bus later, a faded battered old paperback she said someone had left on a train somewhere. "She's America," Kathy said. "I mean, that's what I've been told. She's as American as apple pie and root beer, which tastes like shit by the way."

"You're wrong, twice."

I got a whack then with the paperback, although she was laughing. "Alright, smartarse. So who _is_ America?"

"It's a big country, I'm not sure you can stick a little label over the whole thing at once. Who's England?"

She settled back in her seat, watching the fields go by and thinking. "Wordsworth."

"Not Shakespeare?"

"Wordsworth," she repeated firmly, raising her eyebrows like she was daring me to contradict her again. "And Richard Thompson. Who's America?"

 _I don't know_ , I told her. _I guess that's what I'm trying to find out._ I think that was when I knew I wasn't going to.

We didn't really talk much all the way past Philadelphia, and by the time we hit the home stretch of the New Jersey turnpike Kathy was asleep, hugging her backpack close to her body as if she thought I might steal it even though it was she who'd stolen _my_ sweater to fold up and use as a pillow between her head and the cold window. There was hair in her eyes, blonde tangling with the brown of her lashes, and I reached over to brush it away but I guess she was awake after all because she moved suddenly and bit my fingers, falling back to sleep with a gentle curving smile on her lips. She was – the whole bus was – so still I could see the fluttering pulse beating in her neck.

"Kathy, I'm lost," I whispered. The row of headlights stretched into the distance in both directions, white behind us and red ahead, blurring in the kaleidoscope of rain on the windows. She didn't hear me, of course, and really I was thankful. She could travel forever, I realised, buses and her thumb right to the coast, any coast, and then onto a boat to start it all over again when she arrived somewhere new. But me? I guess I'm just not wired the way I thought I was. There was an aching sort of emptiness inside me that had crept up so slowly that I didn't know it was there, not until the traffic jam of a million lights motionless of the New Jersey turnpike, and I wanted to be back near Saginaw, back in my own room. I wanted to wake her and tell her that _this_ is America, taking on more than you can handle, looking for this American Dream people keep talking about like it's the damn Holy Grail and realising it's back in Kansas waiting for you if you just click your heels and fly home – but I had this strange feeling she'd be disappointed, not in the revelation exactly but in me, like I wasn't dreaming hard enough or something, like I was spoiling everything, and I didn't want that.

She slept on through the traffic, and I counted the cars all the way to Manhattan and waited for her to wake so I could say goodbye.


End file.
